ARTIST STATEMENT

I create layered narratives that blend personal history and archival research with imagined lineages, often centering a recurring fictional character—Vera Otis. Through painting, sculpture, video, textiles, and installation, her story allows me to explore themes of domesticity, labor, desire, and spirituality.

I approach the past not as a fixed record but as a porous space where fact and fiction meet. This clears ground for the absent or erased: the voices never documented, the stories passed down in fragments. By imagining a surrogate figure and new futures, I create continuity where there has been rupture.

I continually return to the tropical environment and the domestic sphere as settings. The tropical landscape emerges as a site of origin and fantasy, filling paintings, collages, and immersive installations with palms and banana leaves. This idealized paradise, constructed from plant diasporas that parallel the histories of the people who inhabit it, begs the question of how to define home. Among the foliage, hidden figures slowly reveal themselves, implicating viewers as voyeurs and transforming invisibility into agency.

On the domestic scale, the work shifts toward the complex architecture of aspiration. In paintings, I layer timelines through diptychs and fragmented compositions. We find Vera in a pristine modernist home, set in contrast with the Tarver Plantation, a real historical estate likely tied to my enslaved ancestors. These dual sites, one imagined, one inherited, become arenas for interrogating the American Dream and its exploitative foundations.

I fluidly move across mediums, shifting between space, image, and object. Through tactile installations, embroidered textiles, and transportive videos, I explore how space can hold memory and materiality evokes knowing. Color is important and influenced by the four-color separation used in print media. Cyan, magenta, black, and yellow optically mix, creating high-key saturation and imperfect representations of the spectrum of blackness, like in Ebony magazines. Scenes fade into sepia, revealing age and wear, or are too perfectly green like a tourist advertisement.

I explore stories shaped by colonial legacies, diaspora, and systems of erasure, but ultimately, I am interested in survival. How do we inherit our stories? How do our stories evolve through archive, imagination, and ritual? My work is an exploration of the endurance of these stories, real and imagined, across continents and through generations. I’ve created a practice that is not only a reflection on the past but an invocation of possible futures: nonlinear, intergenerational, and deeply rooted.